The sturdy optional right-side handle – a must-have
on a single ‘lower’.
The bolt sits inside a tubular ‘carrier’, a heavy steel cylinder, and is turned to lock/unlock it by use of a ‘cam-pin’ in an angled slot in the carrier top wall. As the carrier is pushed (in gas operation) or pulled (in manual operation) back, the bolt cannot move being locked to the barrel-extension, so the carrier moves around a half-inch on its own and turns the bolt via the cam-pin to unlock it. Both then move back together, extract and eject the fired case, reset the trigger. Towards the end of the ejection cycle, the rear end of the carrier moves into a tube inside the buttstock and compresses a large coil spring to power the loading / re-locking part of the cycle. The carrier / bolt assembly move forwards again at some speed stripping a new cartridge from the magazine, chambering it, and re-locking the action. Manual operation simplifies the design as various bits – gas-sealing rings on the bolt body, a gas-block assembly on the barrel and piping – are not needed.
A great AR plus is its modular construction allowing mixing and matching of components. Once you have a pair of receiver halves, everything else is bolted / screwed on or retained by pins, so building an AR
is assembly rather than traditional gunsmithing, although as always there are ‘tricks’ that allow skill and experience to produce a superior product. A major industry producing AR bits has grown up in the USA so buyers can choose from a large range of ready to install pre-chambered barrels; umpteen makes / forms of bolt and carrier; lots of trigger assemblies; goodness knows how many buttstock, forend tube, and pistol-grip designs. One beauty of this is the ability to build bespoke rifles for many different purposes.
Upgrade Seven years and 6,000 + rounds on, my SSR still performed well despite a much eroded barrel throat, but had unsurprisingly lost its ‘edge’, so a rebuild seemed in order. After a lot of thought, I chose conversion to the recently introduced 6.8mm Remington SPC rather than a simple .223 barrel replacement. As well as a new barrel, conversion required a new bolt and magazines. The steeply raked M16A2 buttstock used on its first iteration wasn’t ideal for shooting off a rear-bag, also rather too short for comfortable prone shooting, so I asked SGC to replace it with a Magpul PRS (Precision \ Rifle / Sniper Stock) adjustable assembly. SGC also
Target Shooter 25
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